Nigeria’s federalism is upside down. As such, it is in urgent need of reform. But a new spur by President Bola Tinubu to retool this anomaly might yield the opposite result.
Many things hobble the political system. Take the issue of local government system control, otherwise referred to as LG autonomy. For the past 17 months, the President has frantically but futilely sought to implement a dodgy Supreme Court judgement that undermines the basic tenets of true federalism.
At the behest of a suit by the Attorney-General of the Federation, Lateef Fagbemi, the Court gave “autonomy” to the 774 LGAs, effectively discountenancing the powers of the state governments and the State-LG Joint Account system.
The judgment proves that the law cannot take care of everything in life. Essentially, it has been a battle to implement the ruling, such that the state governors are still in control, one way or the other.
Citing the need for oversight, Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State engineered a new law that overruled the Supreme Court. Other governors employ their own peculiar methods.
Consequently, Tinubu threatened to invoke an Executive Order during an All Progressives Congress meeting on 19 December that would compel the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee to deduct the monthly allocations and pay directly into the LGs’ accounts.
By framing this as a monetary matter, the President misses the point. The issue goes deeper and strikes at the heart of everything wrong with Nigeria’s federalism.
Most federal constitutions operate with the centre and the federating units. The councils are under the control of the federating units – cantons, regions, states, provinces – and not the centre.
This was the case in Nigeria’s First Republic when the LGAs were under the four regions. It is the system in America, Australia and Germany. Some federal states operate a dual LG control system of the centre and sub-nationals. In the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution, the regions exclusively control LGs.
The matter becomes more complicated because in Nigeria, money is shared monthly from resources that an entity did not necessarily generate.
It is a gnawing concern that the military, in its haste to hand over power in 1999, bequeathed a deeply flawed document to Nigeria, listing the 774 LGAs in the Constitution. This is a misunderstanding of federalism, a nagging injustice in which oil-producing Bayelsa has eight, and Jigawa has 27 LGAs. The wrong deepens because the more LGAs a state has, the more allocation it receives.
The current model is anti-development. It induces corruption as governors see LG allocations as another stream of income.
In hindsight, giving funds directly to LGs could be contentious. Before the State-LG Joint Account was created, LGs received their funds directly. This, however, delivered so much inefficiency and graft to the extent that LGs could not pay primary school teachers. To be fair, the governors have been paying this category of public workers since then.
The solution? Don’t force the issue, but give a fillip to true federalism. Amend the Constitution along federalist lines by reinstating state control over the LGs.
Without doubt, the LGAs should be expunged from the Constitution. Each state should be free to create, merge and fund its LGAs as it deems fit.
Tinubu started on this path in 2003 when he created 37 Local Council Development Areas as the governor of Lagos. He faced opposition from the centre, then led by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who seized the state’s LG allocation.
The Supreme Court waded in, giving Lagos and Tinubu a reprieve. The same Supreme Court discountenanced this precedent in its judgment in July 2024 by authorising a vicious assault on federalism when it ruled that LGAs should receive their allocations outside of states.
In the US, the 50 states control the councils. There were more than 90,000 councils in 2022, per the US Census Bureau, with Illinois having the highest at 6,930, more than 1.5 times as many as California, despite having less than a third as many residents, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis.
This is sensible. It is the direction Tinubu should go, rather than chasing shadows and threatening the governors. It is a win for Nigeria because some governors will maximise the advantages conferred. Sooner or later, the electorate will move against the laggards.
